Dead & Buried

Dead & Buried is a 1981 American horror film directed by Gary Sherman, with a cast that includes Melody Anderson, Jack Albertson, and James Farentino. It marks Albertson’s last live-action film appearance; he died six months after the movie came out. The story takes place in a small coastal town where several tourists are killed, only for their bodies to come back to life. The screenplay was written by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. In the early 1980s, the film was banned in the U.K. as a “video nasty,” but it was later cleared of obscenity charges and taken off the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list.

The movie performed poorly at the box office, but critics have praised Stan Winston’s special effects and Albertson’s acting. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro later wrote a novelization of the film, and over the years it has gained a cult following.

**Plot** Amateur photographer George LeMoyne arrives in the coastal town of Potters Bluff. A local woman named Lisa offers to model for him. When he agrees to have sex with her, a mob of townspeople beats him and sets him on fire. George survives the attack but is later killed by Lisa, who poses as a nurse in the hospital. More visitors are murdered by the townspeople. Sheriff Dan Gillis, with help from the eccentric coroner-mortician William G. Dobbs, tries to find a motive for the killings. Gillis grows increasingly disturbed as a grisly death occurs every day. In each case, the killers photograph the victims during the murder. Gillis’s investigation is complicated by his wife Janet’s strange behavior.

After an attack, Gillis accidentally hits someone with his squad car. He finds a twitching severed arm on the car’s grill. The victim attacks Gillis and runs off with the arm. Gillis scrapes some flesh from the vehicle and takes it to a local doctor, who says the tissue has been dead for about four months. Suspicious of Dobbs, Gillis runs a background check and learns that Dobbs was once the chief pathologist in Providence, but was fired ten years earlier for conducting unauthorized experiments in the county morgue.

Gillis confronts Dobbs, who admits he has developed a secret method for reanimating the dead. All the townspeople are reanimated corpses under his control. Dobbs sees himself as an “artist” who uses his undead hordes to create more corpses for his art. Even Janet is a reanimated corpse.